A rare, chilling ghost story that a friend shared with me.
This is one of those tales that often get tangled in the dreamy layer of our imagination. It is hard to tell what’s what until it is too late. It feels so tangible that it almost makes you want to question the person involved for hours.
This ghost story takes me back to my college days, when I used to pay regular visits to a friend’s house. I enjoyed his rib-tickling company so much that I would inadvertently find myself strolling around on his roof. There was so much to unspool over a cup of coffee that we wouldn’t know how time passed.
His house was on the top floor of a two-storied apartment. Since he lived in government quarters, every apartment around the corner looked rather dilapidated. His building was no different. I had heard they were planning on shifting very soon.
One fine day I remember him telling me with a perfectly straight face,
“Dude! I think my house is haunted.”
I was intrigued,
“Whoa Man! Where did that come from?”
He told me about this ghost story then, an incident that had stopped him from sleeping in one of his rooms. The room had a huge window that overlooked a tree that made a poor attempt to embellish the abandoned house below.
The tree was clearly visible from his window. Looking at it, you might have been spooked by its appearance if you knew the story that seemed to lurk around its branches.
I had seen the tree a hundred times before but it always looked the same to me. Probably because I hadn’t experienced what my friend had. But the image of the tree, as we used to chat and fool around in his room, talking about high school shenanigans, is still holed up somewhere in the back of my head.
The Ghost Story: A Voice at the Window
So he began:
He was fast asleep one night, perhaps deep in a dream. The window was wide open the way he preferred it during relentless summer days. The night breeze offered relief from the day’s punishing heat. A cool breath of natural wind promised a deeper, better kip.
His bed was next to the window, where the breeze could reach him as he slept. Being upstairs, he had never expected anyone to reach in from outside. Keeping the bed there had seemed sensible.
The Stranger’s Grip
The leaves rustled owing to occasional gusts. Suddenly, a voice rang from the deepest alcove of his brain.
“Help! Sir! Help!”
He woke up with a start only to find someone calling him from the window. The stranger seemed to be falling and asking for help. Acting on reflex, my friend put out his arm to grab him and stop his fall.
When he did, the stranger grabbed his hand tightly and, to his surprise, started pulling him out through the window. In a fraction of a second, as he realised what a sham it was, my friend tried to release himself from the grip.
Keeping one hand on the parapet, he tried to pull himself back. But the clutch was taut. The night-stranger wouldn’t let go. Then suddenly, with all his might, my friend jerked himself back onto the bed. As that happened he switched on the lights to check what all that was about. He tried to look through the window, but surprisingly there was no one there. The weirdest thing was that there was nowhere for the stranger to have been standing.
Too scared to sleep in that room, he headed straight for where his parents were. He moved his bed there and slept near them until the family shifted.
As he narrated the account to me, it clogged up my head with numerous questions. Questions I kept asking as I tried to wrap my head around it. But he was adamant that it happened. All of it. That it wasn’t a dream, and that he was pulled by that man asking for help.
Looking Back at the Ghost Story
The sheer horror hidden in this ghost story has never quite left me. I think and rethink the possibilities that might have triggered it. Could someone have played a trick on him using the tree? The tree’s presence alone did not explain the grip he described or the stranger’s disappearance.
One possibility that crossed my mind was a sleep-related experience. The NHS notes that hallucinations can happen around falling asleep or waking up. That gave me a possible explanation, not an answer to what happened in his room. I had his account, and he remained certain it was real.
I remember studying one night when I was really tired and sleepy. I stopped looking at my book for a second and stared blankly at the bottom of the bed, and in those few seconds of drowsiness, I found a cat’s image looking back at me. I opened my eyes wider to check but there was nothing there. I came to believe that my mind had created an image of a cat as I skimmed the surface of drowsiness.
Whatever the case might have been, it is much cooler to brand it a ghost story. To me, it remains one of a kind.
For another unsettling night and the questions it left behind, read our Broken Bridge story.
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